3d scanning

Oh, to work at Disney, to have a hand in creating those lusciously detailed 3D worlds, every character lovingly rendered, every animal sidekick unique and hilarious, every tree… filled with leaves. Designed and placed individually. In movies that take place in forests. There has to be a better way. What if you could just 3D scan some leaves and then tweak them to your liking? Read More

It seems that even scientific endeavors fall victim to feature creep — or in the case of an effort to scan all fishes that has expanded to include all vertebrates, creature creep. More than a dozen learning institutions are pooling their resources to create detailed 3D scans, inside and out, of more than 20,000 animals. Read More

A new startup called CALA aims to make it easier for new designers to break into the fashion business by offering everything needed to run their e-commerce operations – from production to delivery. In addition, CALA’s new mobile app where this apparel is sold is upending the traditional way garment sizes are created and fitted by way of 3D body scanning technology. The result… Read More

Not content with letting you 3D print your images on demand, Scandy is today launching a beta program for its $500 device to make it easy to scan objects in 3D, all from your Android device. The company is using 3D sensors from pmd to get 0.3mm feature precision, putting resolutions from far more expensive machines in the hands of consumers. Read More

A drone is a great eye in the sky, but if you want richer data than what its cameras show — for example, detailed 3D maps — you might be looking at a few hours of processing time. That is, unless your HQ is rocking Lockheed Martin’s cool-sounding Hydra Fusion tools, which can build that 3D map in real time from just video. Read More

If you were wondering what a mottled sculpin looks like, there are plenty of pictures available online. But while they may satisfy a curious tidepooler, the discerning ichthyologist demands more. That’s why a professor at the University of Washington is getting full 3D scans of every fish in the sea — every species, anyway. Read More

Not since the extinction of the dinosaurs has Earth lost so much life. This time, however, it can’t be attributed to asteroids, volcanic eruptions or an ice age. Humans are the perpetrators. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, 99 percent of today’s threatened species are at risk because of human activities, which range from habitat destruction to poaching. If this… Read More

Matthew Vincent is one of the members of Project Mosul, an effort to recreate the lost artifacts at the Mosul Museum that were recently destroyed by ISIS fighters. By taking pictures and images of the broken artifacts, the group hopes to recreate them with 3D printers, storing at least the shape and quality of the originals to keep them safe, at least in a digital form. He spoke with me about… Read More

In what could be one of the most interesting and important uses of 3D scanning to come along in a long while, the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage is working to collect photographs of the destroyed statues that can be used to piece together 3D models of the destroyed artifacts. With enough visual data, the group should be able to recreate the objects to scale and undo… Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to manipulate objects in photos in three dimensions, allowing you to see all sides of formerly 2D objects. How is it done? Some might say there is dark magic afoot, but what’s really happening is far more interesting. Read More

Spanish startup E-Capture R&D is building a tablet with 3D sensing capabilities that’s aiming to target the enterprise space as a portable tool for surveyors, civil engineers, architects and the like — replacing a slew of standalone instruments. Read More

Using a piece of paper with a specially printed grid and a regular smartphone, Rendor may have just cracked the 3D scanning code. The system allows you to create a 3D scan of almost any object simply by taking video of it from every angle. The program interpolates the shape of the object based on how it is positioned on the grid and then generates a usable 3D file. Read More

Artec, makers of high-end 3D scanners for industrial clients, have added a little whimsy to your day with Shapify.me, a service that can scan and print your body in full color, allowing you to make a little mini me of your very own. Read More

The folks at MakerBot have been teasing their Digitizer desktop 3D scanner since this past March, but now they’re finally ready to push it out the door. For $1,400, you too can scan all the little knick-knacks in your life and turn them into 3D schematics to print or share with others. Read More

As services go, 3D scanning is pretty hard. To get good models you need expensive lasers and data acquisition systems and even the Kinect-based scanners require expensive hardware… or do they? Read More

While Windows 3D scanning software has until now outperformed any Apple counterpart, Occipital Inc. plans to remedy that today with the launch of Skanect for OS X.
Originally developed by France-based startup ManCTL, Skanect allows users to create 3D scans on Apple computers using low-cost sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect or ASUS Xtion. ManCTL was acquired by Occipital in June… Read More